Innovations in products or marketing, the introduction of new or improved products, sales to new customers or additional sales to existing customers, and other approaches to expanding the amount of market share controlled by a company or other commercial entity have historically been primary drivers for revenue growth. However, as markets mature and consolidate, a larger fraction of revenue realized by a commercial entity (used herein to refer broadly to a company, corporation, organization, person, group of persons, or the like that undertakes commercial activity, including but not limited to sales of products and/or services to customers) may be derived from renewals of recurring revenue assets. As used herein, a recurring revenue asset can generally refer to one or more of maintenance and/or support agreements for software or hardware, service covered products, service contracts, subscription agreements, warranties, renewables, or the like.
Many commercial entities fail to maximize realization of revenue from recurring revenue assets at least in part because management of such assets is not well supported by currently available approaches. Currently available tools for managing recurring revenue are spread across customer relationship management (CRM) systems, partner relationship management (PRM) systems, data warehouses, entitlement systems, billing systems, and even spreadsheets or the like. However, recurring revenue management presents a number of challenges that differ in substantial and important ways from the typical focus of the sales staff of a commercial entity.
A typical sales process involves closing a sale or deal and moving on to a next customer. In contrast, a recurring revenue relationship is by definition repetitive, and is not efficiently tracked or managed by tools designed to support initial sales. In addition, the commercial entity's existing investments in sales personnel, sales processes, and information systems are typically directed to, and are optimized and supported with appropriate technology for, achieving maximum revenue performance in the product or services sales business, not the management of recurring revenue streams and the sales activities necessary to ensure that recurring revenue assets are maintained and even increased in value. Optimizing the recurring revenue such as service contracts and other service assets requires resolving challenges that span multiple areas of a company's operations. In today's ever-changing market landscape, service revenues have become integrally related to the success of a commercial entity. The problem, however, is that as commercial entities begin to recognize the need for this updated focus, they run into a host of challenges for which they are not prepared.
For example, a company often has to deal with fragmented data from disparate sources, and this data can be inaccurate, incomplete and sometimes duplicated, particularly in a sales channel or when selling through the channel. Further, in the case of a merger or acquisition, various legacy systems lead to complexity. Another challenge is a lack of specialization toward service contracts or service renewals. Most company data is centered on the products it sells, rather than the services contracted post sale of those products. A lack of industry focus on recurring service revenue has lead to a dearth of standard metrics and proven best practices.
Previously available approaches to recurring revenue management have not included a unified repository, or even any other way of collecting and organizing these types of information that are important to optimizing recurring revenue sales, that integrates data from multiple, disparate external client systems in support of an asset data model capable of resolving the key questions of what (e.g. services, serviceable products, etc.) has been purchased, who (e.g. which commercial entity) made the purchase or purchases, who is the end user of the purchased services or serviceable products, where are the purchased services or serviceable products being used, how are the purchased services or serviceable products being used, how satisfied is the end user (and optionally other at the commercial entity) with the purchased services or serviceable products, where are other opportunities for sales of additional related or unrelated services to the commercial entity as a result of the sale of the purchased services or serviceable products, and the like. Furthermore, software systems to automate and optimize the recurring revenue market have generally been limited in regards to analytics specific and relevant to recurring revenue assets, well-developed key performance indicators (KPIs) for management of such assets, the ability to acquire and aggregate the data streams, and other useful features that support optimization of recurring revenue sales and renewals.